Atheists Can Have Their Hate and Eat it Too

Atheists and Antitheists parade extreme examples of personal tragedy as proof of God’s non-existence, or at the very least, proof he isn’t personal and doesn’t care. They cite examples of other people’s tragedies involving natural disasters, terminal disease and man’s inhumanity to man, then with characteristic pompous conceit, assume their own emotional interpretations of these events are also held by the people directly effected by the specific misfortunes they are using to illustrate their point. Their own vicarious feelings of indignant betrayal and injustice are projected onto the circumstances of these victims not only as if they spoke for them but as if they spoke for everyone, as if their own feelings and thoughts on the subject were undeniably universal and absolute. As if they were the final and ultimate arbiters of good and evil.

Then when it’s revealed that the very people they use as puppets to promote their agenda have an opposite world view, they instantly abandon and replace their trappings of magnanimous empathy with cold, unblinking lidless disdain for these traitors of reason who voluntarily abdicate right thinking for a belief in a loving God who doesn’t exist. If a man is drawn closer to God a result of a trial in his life he must be self-deluded! If religion were somehow extracted from his psyche, the ignorant fool would feel the same rational disgust for God and the people who believe in him as they do! He would then react properly to personal tragedy!

But that’s not true.

Before I became a Christian I was a replica of the Antitheists I just described, I didn’t have “religion”, yet I can recount several instances where a traumatic event prompted me to instantly seek God for help and comfort, bypassing my normal Antitheist thought processes –because I didn’t have time to think about it! I didn’t have time to “put on” my memorized hostility of God!

For example, years before my conversion I remember standing alone, eyes turned to Heaven while spontaneously crying out in anguish to God over a cataclysmic event in my life.

Why would I do that!? I was a Deist! I didn’t believe in a personal God! My solitary plea to God the Father was sudden and without forethought, in response to an unexpected event. I didn’t have time to think about it in advance! And somehow I knew I had been heard! Somehow I knew I didn’t grieve alone! Somehow I knew it wasn’t God’s fault!

Sometime later when I pondered this curious event, I wondered.

“What if?”

Then instantly retorted, “Nah, can’t be! God is an emotionless force of which I am merely a side-effect, an unintended consequence. It must be latent religious indoctrination from my youth.”

What indoctrination? I had been to perhaps a dozen different churches a handful of times in my childhood! We definitely were not a religious family!

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I’d wager the most adamant Atheist and Antitheist who isn’t outright mentally deranged, would find and have found themselves at times pleading to God for help and comfort a moment before they had time to think about what they were doing!

Although they wouldn’t admit it.

That would require intellectual honesty. That would require following the evidence where it leads. That would require admitting their hearts know something their minds deny. That would require repenting of and eating their previous hateful words. It’s their choice, as are the consequences of that choice. They can’t have their hate and eat it too!

That’s very funny Richard: “An atheist isn’t an atheist when they’re in a foxhole”! I can remember there were times when I was a Deist crying out to a personal God that I didn’t believe existed! Yet I found comfort in reaching out to that Heavenly Father my intellect insisted didn’t exist! Sometimes the heart and the mind are at odds!!